s were inspiring. He bade his race to expect improvement in its
condition not from any political party nor from Northern benevolence,
but from its own advance in industry and character. His great and
successful college at Tuskegee, with an enrolment of 1,231 students in
1889, gave much impetus to industrial education among the blacks,
turning in that direction educational interest and energy which had
previously found vent to too great an extent, relatively, in providing
negro students with mere literary training. The Slater-Armstrong
Memorial Trades' Building, dedicated January 10, 1890, was erected and
finished by the students practically alone. At least three-fourths of
those receiving instruction at this school pursued, after leaving, the
industries learned there.

The color line had ceased to be sectional. In 1900 mobs in New York City
and Akron, Ohio, baited black citizens with barbarity little less than
that of the worst Southern lynchings. Texas courts the same year
affirmed negroes' right to serve as jurymen. After 1900 one noticed in
several Southern States a tendency to oust negroes from official
connection even with the Republican party, each State organization
affecting to be "Lily-White." The Administration seemed to favor this
movement by appointing liberal Democrats at the South to federal
offices, allying such, in a way, with the Republican cause. This helped
make President Roosevelt popular at the South, spite of the criticism
with which the press there greeted his entertainment of Booker T.
Washington at the White House. When he visited the Exposition at
Charleston, December, 1901-May, 1902, he was enthusiastically received.

CHAPTER X.

THE MEN AND THE ISSUE IN 1896

[1890-1896]

Early in 1896 it became clear that the dominant issue of the
presidential campaign would be the resumption by the United States of
silver-dollar free coinage. Agitation for this, hushed only for a moment
by the passage of the Bland Act, had been going on ever since
demonetization in 1873. The fall in prices, which the new output of gold
had not yet begun to arrest; the money stringency since 1893; the
insecure, bond-supplied gold reserve, and the repeal of the
silver-purchase clause in the Sherman Act combined to produce a wish for
increase in the nation's hard-money supply. Had the climax of fervor
synchronized with an election day, a free-coinage President might have
been elected.

Only the Populists were a uni